Be The Media

Weiner: I promise to let you listen

5. I promise to let you listen (0:38)

Weiner: Tomorrow is of course is the big night – I can’t wait till it’s over. I am going to do the entire debate ad-free. You run it on TV if you’re home. I’ll talk. Uh, I will not make comments over the candidate’s speeches. Generally, I won’t. Unless there’s such an egregious statement that I have to comment upon, but I promise to let you listen. I will then make statements probably over the, uh, so-called moderator’s statements, that’s uh baggy-eyed Bolshevik, the same old, same old, Jim Lehrer. I don’t know how he got in th I have no idea. You talk about liberal bias. I mean Dan Rather would have been a more uh uh reasonable moderator than Jim Lehrer.

Weiner: I wont interrupt any of the discussion

4. I won't interrupt any of the discussion

Weiner: You don’t have to turn the show off, because I, we’re gonna run the the debates the whole, the whole thing – no ads. And you can watch it on TV if you want and listen to me because I will make comments, I won’t interrupt any of the, uh, discussion, but I will make comments uh probably over the baggy eyed Bolshevik, Jim Lehrer. And during breaks and things like that. I’ll make my own observations because that’s what you wanna hear.

Weiner: I can say anything I want

3. I can say anything I want. (0:11)

Weiner: That’s what I’d like to say but no one listens to the show, you know a few people. The big people don’t listen to the show, they don’t want anything to do with the Savage Nation. So I can basically say anything I want. See that’s the freedom of my show.

The Cowardly Broadcasting System

Mary Jacoby in Salon.com:

"One measure of the debacle is a "60 Minutes Wednesday" segment that millions of viewers now will now not see: a hard-hitting report making a powerful case that in trying to build support for the Iraq war, the Bush administration either knowingly deceived the American people about Saddam Hussein's nuclear capabilities or was grossly credulous. CBS news president Andrew Heyward spiked the story this week, saying it would be "inappropriate" during the election campaign.

The importance that CBS placed on the report was evident by its unusual length: It was slated to run a full half hour, double the usual 15 minutes of a single segment. Although months of reporting went into the production, CBS abruptly decided that it would be "inappropriate to air the report so close to the presidential election," in the words of a statement that network spokeswoman Kelli Edwards gave the New York Times.

The real reason, of course, was that because of CBS's sloppy reporting on the Bush National Guard story, the network's news executives believed they could no longer report credibly on the heart of the Iraq nuclear issue, involving another set of completely forged documents: those purporting to show that Iraq had purchased yellowcake uranium from the African country Niger."

It's the spin, not the debate

From the Los Angeles Times:

"Why do I say that? Four years ago, instant polls conducted by the media after the first debate between then-Texas Gov. Bush and Vice President Al Gore showed a narrow Gore advantage. Furthermore, respondents indicated in these initial measurements (taken among 500 people over the telephone in the 30 minutes after the debate ended) that the debates had almost no effect on their choice for president. Those who were for Bush before the debates remained in support of him immediately after. The same was true for Gore's supporters.

Yet, within a week (a week during which not much else of substance happened in the campaign), Bush had gained 8 percentage points. In addition, polls showed that the American people had changed their minds and were now convinced that Bush, not Gore, had won the encounter.

How did this happen?

The Bush campaign had persuaded the media, and hence the American people, that the vice president was overbearing and presumptuous in his manner during the debate. And so even though some people had initially said Gore offered more elaborate answers during the debate, by a week after the encounter, the tide of public perception had shifted and Bush was believed to have won. With that belief came a significant narrowing of Gore's margin in national polls."

The politicization of journalism

From FAIR:

"In an outrageous politicization of journalism, CBS announced it would not air a report on forged documents that the Bush administration used to sell the Iraq war until after the November 2 election (New York Times, 9/25/04). A network spokesperson issued a statement declaring, "We now believe it would be inappropriate to air the report so close to the presidential election."

Of course, what's really inappropriate here is CBS allowing its PR problems to suppress a news report on an important issue until after it no longer matters. The shelved 60 Minutes story deals with the origins of documents purportedly showing that Iraq under Saddam Hussein tried to obtain uranium from Niger-- documents that turned out to be forgeries. The story, according to the Newsweek online report, asks "tough questions about how the White House came to embrace the fraudulent documents and why administration officials chose to include a 16-word reference to the questionable uranium purchase in President Bush's 2003 State of the Union speech."

Though such questions are clearly relevant to a presidential campaign that largely revolves around Bush's decision to invade Iraq, CBS intends to keep the answers to itself until the election has passed. Could there be more than the embarrassment over the Guard story behind this decision?

Sumner Redstone, CEO of CBS's parent company Viacom, made an unusual political statement at a gathering of corporate leaders in Hong Kong (Asian Wall Street Journal, 9/24/04):

"I don't want to denigrate Kerry... but from a Viacom standpoint, the election of a Republican administration is a better deal. Because the Republican administration has stood for many things we believe in, deregulation and so on. The Democrats are not bad people.... But from a Viacom standpoint, we believe the election of a Republican administration is better for our company."

Redstone repeated these sentiments in an interview with Time (10/4/04):

"There has been comment upon my contribution to Democrats like Senator Kerry. Senator Kerry is a good man. I've known him for many years. But it happens that I vote for Viacom. Viacom is my life, and I do believe that a Republican administration is better for media companies than a Democratic one."

Reporters put under scrutiny in CIA leak

By Adam Liptak in the New York Times

"Leak investigations are often halfhearted and one-sided enterprises. Suspected leakers are questioned, not always vigorously or under oath, and the source of the disclosure is seldom found. The journalists who could say for sure are almost never subpoenaed.

The Plame case is different. This is largely because, unlike most leaks, the disclosure of an undercover intelligence agent's identity is a felony. The disclosure of Ms. Plame's identity, moreover, may have been motivated by politics. And the investigation inside the government, in which the president, the vice president and many other officials have been questioned, seems to have been both exhaustive and inconclusive.

The only remaining witnesses to the crime are the journalists who received the information about Ms. Plame, leaving them to make agonizing choices against a backdrop of diminishing legal protection. In recent years, courts have become increasingly skeptical of a journalistic article of faith: that the benefits to society of the information provided by confidential sources outweigh the costs to the justice system of allowing reporters to protect their sources.

"It's aiding and abetting a crime," Mr. Sun said of the journalists who published Ms. Plame's name.

He added that journalists should face the same sanctions as other citizens. "People are compelled to talk all the time," he said, "or they get thrown in the can for contempt. Very few prosecutors have been willing to take on the press, historically."

Probe pushed for TV reporter's death

By John Eggerton in Broadcasting and Cable:

"The Committee to Protect Journalists has sent a letter to Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld asking for a probe into the Sept. 12 U.S. airstrikes that killed 13 civilians, including a TV reporter for Dubai's Al-Arabiya, and injured two cameraman, one a free-lancer and the other working for Reuters.

Committee Executive Director Ann Cooper called for a public and "transparent investigation...including an examination of whether this attack may have violated the principles of international law that prohibit the use of indiscriminate fire."

Al-Arabiya reporter Mazen Al-Tumeizi was taping a story near a disabled Bradley armored vehicle when it was hit by a U.S. missile, killing him and a dozen others. The U.S. military has provided differing stories, points out Cooper, with one officer saying the missile was fired to prevent looting of equipment, then another saying it was to return insurgent fire.

The accounts of some eyewitnesses are at odds with those versions, she says, "[raising] serious questions about whether the use of fire by U.S. forces was indiscriminate or disproportionate to any military advantage."

How the Internet turned everyone into James Carville

By Farhad Manjoo in Salon.com

"How is it possible that amateur political junkies are potentially having an effect on actual campaigns? The answer is that the Internet has fundamentally changed politics as we know it. There is just so much out there that we didn't have access to four years ago: polling data, fundraising data, media-buy data; instant access to every TV ad and press release and unguarded gaffe and well-timed leak to jolt the campaign; insider dish on what the media's covering and what it's not covering and why; and perhaps most fun of all, there are massive online communities in which hundreds of thousands of people submit their mostly corny, often silly, and sometimes unimaginably brilliant ideas for how this candidate or that should run his campaign. "As a political junkie," says Moulitsas, "this is heaven for me."

In the grand scheme of technological progress, increased access by bloggers to political information isn't the most astounding development. Glenn Reynolds, the University of Tennessee law professor who runs the popular, right-ish blog Instapundit, notes that "if you look at a more general picture of the world recently, the difference between amateurs and professionals has vanished in a whole lot of ways. For instance, look at music — it used to be you only knew about studio stuff if you were a serious musician; the amateur would never know about it. But now you can set these things up at home. The insider tricks aren't insider tricks anymore, now that outsiders have access to the knowledge." A similar thing has occurred in film and photography with the advent of digital imaging, or in journalism with the advent of the Web and of blogs themselves. Why should political strategy be any different?"

The Daily Show's audience more likely to have college degrees than Bill O'Reilly's audience

By David Bauder in Salon.com

"The folks at Comedy Central were annoyed when Fox News Channel's Bill O'Reilly kept referring to "The Daily Show" audience as "stoned slackers." So they did a little research. And guess whose audience is more educated?

Viewers of Jon Stewart's show are more likely to have completed four years of college than people who watch "The O'Reilly Factor," according to Nielsen Media Research.

'If you listen to O'Reilly, you get the sense that it was crazy longhairs behind the show,' he said. 'And it's not. It's great, smart television that attracts a well-compensated audience, most of whom are voting age."